About
Who I Am - Or at least who I claim to be on the internet.
Bio
I'm a Technical Software Manager at Oxford Nanopore Technologies. I lead a team of software engineers and make internal developer tools that - ideally - prevent other engineers from wanting to throw their laptops into the sea.
Eight years of doing this has taken me across the entire stack. C systems programming. React web apps. Robotics middleware. Python CLI tools. If it involves making software work - or more often, figuring out why it doesn't - I've probably touched it.
I care about developer experience, observability tooling, and building systems that make engineers productive instead of miserable. These are related goals.
When I'm not writing code or pretending to know what I'm doing in meetings, I'm exploring AI-assisted development and tinkering with whatever technology seems interesting enough to justify the time investment.
Skills & Technologies
Experience
Oxford Nanopore Technologies
Current EmployerI manage a team of four software engineers. This involves the usual suspects: mentoring, objectives, performance reviews, and convincing people that their work matters — because it does.
Most of my time goes into building internal developer tools: log aggregation platforms, deployment management apps, and dashboards that make platform operations slightly less painful. The stack is React, NextJS, Electron, Typescript and Python, depending on what needs hitting.
A significant portion of my sanity has gone into making C++ builds behave like civilized software. Conan, CMake, Docker, Artifactory. Some engineers are converts. Others look at me like I've suggested we rewrite everything in Rust.
UK Atomic Energy Authority (RACE)
Led a software development team. Mentored engineers, allocated work, ran reviews, hired people. The leadership trifecta.
I was a key contributor to CorteX – RACE's robotic middleware for distributed systems. This meant integrating with ROS2, Qt, OPC-UA, and EtherCAT, plus building interfaces for industrial manipulators using whatever proprietary API the hardware vendor decided to inflict on us.
Helped put CI/CD pipelines and Git workflows in place. Infrastructure work - the sort that only gets mentioned when its missing.